Margot and someone else came to San Francisco to check out Suzuki Roshi as
a teacher for a study group she and some of her friends, all married to
big deal business men in New York, had formed to do some study and
meditation. I met Margot on that visit of hers to SFZC and in time I took
Suzuki Roshi to New York to meet with her and her group. And after Roshi
died I then went east to work with that group. When I was in New York I
stayed with Margot and she and I became quite close. small world no?

Thanks
Zentatsu Richard Baker for forwarding this message to him from
Brother David
Steindl-Rast:
I just received this news: Margot Loines Morrow Wilkie, passed away
at the age of 101 on the full-moon Mandala Day of August 21 (2013).Thought
you might want to know. Margot was a great lady; wasn't she?

NY Times Obit:
WILKIE--Margot Loines Morrow, of New York and Martha's Vineyard, died
peacefully August 21. She was predeceased by her son Stephen Morrow and
her stepdaughter Edith Wilkie, and survived by her daughters Faith Morrow
Williams of Washington, DC, and Constance Morrow Fulenwider of Weston, MA,
eight grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren, and three stepchildren,
Rennie Lieber, Neil Wilkie, and Peter Wilkie.

From cuke
12-16-99:
In New York I met with Margot Wilkie, 87 and sharp and energetic as can
be. Like Elsie, Margot's history with Buddhism goes way back and there's
an interesting story there. She started the second off-Broadway theater in
NYC in 1935 and a women's discussion group there in 1958 which included
the writers Nancy Wilson Ross and Ann Morrow Lindberg. Suzuki-roshi met
with them a few of the few times he went to the East Coast.

Margot Wilkie

Margot Wilkie is 87 years old, alert, strong, and wonderful looking. I
interviewed her in New York City when I was there in June, 1999, in her
apartment near Madison and Park Ave. and in a restaurant not far from
there. We talked for hours. She and Nancy Wilson Ross, Anne-Marie Lindberg
and some other women of the arts have continued meeting in her apartment
since the fifties. She's the only one left of the old group who haven't
"died or lost their minds." It was an honor to meet her. Here's
her story.--DC

Suzuki Roshi said Americans are very religious, but they have no steel.
No strength, he meant. He hoped they’d learn, but he didn’t want to
teach them that way. I never saw him angry. I thought he was a wiser
person than you normally come up against.

I got a feeling of what to look for by having known him. What to look
for in wisdom. When you want to find a wise person, I learned from him
what a wise person was. I learned how to look for other teachers from him.
Later when I met teachers I recognized that same quality in them that he
had.

It was exciting to be in on the beginnings of Buddhism in America. To
know Ruth Fuller Sasaki and that woman who translated for Nyogen Senzaki
– what’s her name? – I met her with Kirshnamurti. She wrote two
books. I was brought up as a Theosophist. It’s been interesting to be
around . . .

What I loved about Zen was the fact that there was something you could
do: sit. I had no idea what would happen. Nobody would tell me. . . .
facing the wall, centered yourself, learned . . . . it was a real gift to
me. I remember that. I thought I’m going to do something that has this
sort of discipline, this sort of form. To study the inner life with
discipline involved.

Crooked Cucumber was a remarkable picture of a remarkable man – the
inner Suzuki. It’s wonderful the way he taught you how not to judge
yourself or other people. Always buffeting, trying to protect people from
being hard on themselves in a judgmental way.

Crooked Cucumber captured how he was. It was wonderful. When I went
there for the first time Nancy Wilson Ross and I went together. Yvonne was
in the office on Bush Street. You could tell right off that there was
something going on with her there. There was a sense of activity, of
something happening. Suzuki Roshi was one of the most thoughtful people.
When he brought Zen to America he wanted to find out what Americans were
like. What was their inner nature (due to our culture). He saw that we had
good will. We wished to be helpful. Everyone has the capacity for
spiritual growth. He believed that. He knew that. He was trying not to
make it too rigid. He pointed the way and he left people room to move. He
didn’t leave them boxed. A being like Suzuki is related to everyone. He
was evolved enough as a person in his spiritual approach emotionally so he’s
like a fire – no that’s the wrong word. Very alive, not shut off. So
you must go with their gift. He’s so gifted. He can relate. Like a quiet
shining light. He had the gift of consolation.

He had spent a day here with Nancy Wilson Ross and Mary Strudwood. He
never felt exclusive. I used to exclude people. I learned not to do that
from him. He was right where he was. He did not distrust. He was right
there, walking, talking, and you could reach him. He related with each
person differently. I was fascinated seeing how he made everyone feel he
was available to them. Humbly and in a spirited sense. He had a lack of
pride.

We have this group. They come in to have tea and discuss a book or some
new wave subject or Sufism. We read all of Zimmer, Indian religions, about
the Jains, etc. We hadn’t gotten to meditate. One woman had tried, so
Dick Baker brought Suzuki Roshi. We’d invite people in our living room.
Suzuki came and took his shoes off outside the door. I have this small
armchair, and he came in and sat down, and put his hands in his lap, and
said, "I like it here." We talked about would he show us how to
meditate. The night before he talked at an interdenominational church on
36th Street and Madison – between Madison and Park.

David: Oh yeah, that’s the talk that Peter Schneider set up.

Margot: We sat in the living room and did kinhin around the dining room
table and talked. There were about 10 people. Someone said, "What is
Zen?" And he held up his hand with two open fingers and said,
"Not two." And brought them together. "One." That was
in about February of ‘68. That’s when we first met.

Margot: Nancy and I walked up at the church the night we first heard
him and greeted him. Dick introduced us, and that’s how he came to come
to our apartment. He was around for three or four days. We had tea. I
said, "Could I be your student?" And he said, "Yeah. I’ll
teach you how to sit. You can go to the New York zendo and do zazen with
Edo Roshi and sit there. You don’t need to have him as a teacher but he
can help you."

I went to California for a board meeting of a school at Ojai and Suzuki
Roshi said, "Come over to Sokoji." So I went to the balcony at
Sokoji and sat early in the morning. I was staying at a hotel for four
days. He showed me Emanuel, the Page Street building. It was the summer of
‘69. We went up on the roof and that’s when he said the thing about
steel – Americans needing to have more steel. I asked him about sex. I
asked are your students having trouble being celibate? He said, "I’m
learning." I asked, "How do you feel about all these young
people?" "The nice thing about Americans – very spiritual
nature, but no discipline. They have to become like steel." A steel
rod image is what I got.

But now I'm a Tibetan and the Tibetans are more happy.

[Not than Suzuki. She meant Zen people in general.--DC]

Margot: Suzuki talked of shikantaza when he met with us. I was thrilled
with that teaching. It’s not really intellectual. The feeling of being
able to make a direct connection through your hara to the universe. I
never did koans, no matter what. Even if studying with Rinzai teachers.

Same year, in the following summer, marvelous way he taught and thought
about teaching. So original. No axe to grind. Not feeling how to handle
this type of character, so different from the Japanese. (Wasn’t sure how
to handle this type of American character.) He pulled back from so many of
the forms he had learned – like taking a lid off the sugar pot. He
taught formally, but not the way it was taught to him. He was always
thinking – how to teach Zen in America. So he felt his way along. Like a
snake getting out of his old skin. But still the essence of Zen. Really
extraordinary. Crust off his back that he put on in training. He freed
himself of that. He spoke to us without giving a lot of tiresome form. But
still some sense of practice. He did not want to give the stock Japanese
answers.

I went to Tassajara and I was going to spend ten days and do tangaryo
there [an initiatory all day sitting]. I’d never done that. So the first
day I got very quiet. Suzuki Roshi was there. He was walking in his
garden. He had this great big stone he was going to move about ten feet.
All that wonderful magic way he could move stones. And he was so laid
back, pushing and digging. Not seeming to do anything. He went to sit
zazen and came back. Then I went to sit zazen, and it was done. So the
next day I started to sit tangaryo. They told me what to do. I was a
terrible sitter. Katherine Thanas was there.

At two p.m. I was a wreck. I’d never done anything in my life like
that. I went to Katherine and said, oh, I can’t stand it, I have to give
up. She said, "Wait till the thirty minute break after lunch and then
go lie down." And I did. And I made it through it. I cleaned cabins
and went to San Francisco. There I saw Suzuki and I said, I’ve done
tangaryo, and I worked at Tassajara. What should I do now? He said,
"Just sit."

[Then she went to Japan. She was there for five weeks – a week in
Kyoto, three weeks with Soen Roshi. She sat through a sesshin – three
weeks in intensive practice there, probably. Soen Roshi’s temple:
Ryutakuji. She didn’t like it at all. That was in 1975-76 she said but
it wasn’t, not if she saw Suzuki Roshi afterwards cause he died in 1971.
Came back to San Francisco.

Margot: Soen would lead Edo Roshi’s sesshins in Connecticut.

Then I helped raise money with Amelia and Bill Johnston. We went to
Japan together. Bill Johnston was vice president of U.S. Steel. He felt at
home with Japan and tea ceremony. We went to Tokyo with one woman tea
student. I met. Zenkei Shibayama wrote A Flower Does not Talk. He had a
beautiful zendo in Kyoto. We left Bill in Tokyo and went to Hakuin Zendo
at Ryutakuji. We were staying in Soen Roshi’s mother’s home. She had
just died. The woman I was with didn’t feel well but I did all of the
sittings, and she did some of them. In the middle of the day he’d beckon
us to his room and offer us whiskey. He did that two or three times during
the sesshin. And take us for walks.

There was a flowering tree with lots of branches. Soen Roshi broke a
branch off, and then he took five or ten shoots off it and held it up to
us and said, "See, less is more."

Trungpa based a lot of his teaching on Suzuki Roshi. He used zafus,
oryoki [cloth wrapped monk's eating bowls], let people sit for an hour
before lectures. In Vermont Pema Chodrun said, "We have red square
cushions because he met Suzuki Roshi." He said if we want to train
spiritually we have to sit first. Trungpa also looked for a new way to
teach Americans. (She feels he was influenced by Suzuki Roshi in doing
that.)

(Coming back to San Francisco from Soen Roshi’s sesshin in Japan):
Flying back to San Francisco I knew Suzuki Roshi was ill (fall 1971) and I
called up Dick.

David: So Dick was back. Late October.

Margot: Dick said he hadn’t had supper but he didn’t want to go far
– but he came for awhile. I sent Suzuki Roshi some azaleas or something.
I went to see him and he said, "I love azaleas" and "my
cancer is my teacher." That’s all I remember. The big thing is I
saw someone who had broken through. Who had grown spiritually. I'd never
met anyone like that. I knew he was free and wouldn’t harm people. His
character wouldn’t harm people. His teaching. I realized I’d never met
anyone as free of character karma, inhibitions. You can see it when you
look in their eyes. Because of meeting him I knew how to find this sort of
teacher.

My group here in New York started in 1958. I was asked by the
Cosmopolitan Club, this intellectual club in New York – you had to be an
artist, or a woman who did things – I was an actress in theater –
summer theater. And when they brought it to New York – it started with
two kids in Brattleboro. I was 23. Paul Osborne, playwright, asked us to
come to New York. We were successful. We were actors and the company
wanted to act all winter. We found a theater in Brooklyn. At the time
there was only one off-Broadway theater in the (?) Playhouse. That was in
‘37. It ran for three years, then the war came. The discussion group –
there was Nancy Wilson Ross, Ann Marie Medford, Evelyn Ames (she was
around) – Evelyn Ames studied at Zen Center – there were others.

No one except Nancy Wilson Ross and me knew anything about all this.
She had studied with Alice Bates, the Theosophist. Now we had a group with
40-year-olds, writers in their 70s or 80s. Many people have died or lost
their minds. For some reason somewhat due to Blanche Hartman’s coming
here, a few who she knew have joined us – in their 40s or 50s. Some of
them have quit after five years. Some of us have had some experiences –
sons dying, cousins dying in front of you. We read about Sufism and Native
Americans. Cults in Latin America. Buddhism, Hinduism. We read Huston
Smith’s book. William James. Zimmer on India. I always liked Buddhism.
Partly because of Theosophy. Huston Smith’s chapter on Christianity was
very beautiful in one of his books. Eileen Fagle has come here. She wrote
Monastics, Gospels, an Adam and Eve book. She’s a Princeton professor.
Brother David used to come. [I want to ask her about Alan Watts.] He’s
at Mount Xavier now.

The group has another dimension, other than the ordinary book group.
Beyond their lives with husbands, or being single. The older group made a
difference in their lives. Most, when they left, wanted to move more
deeply into Christianity or found Buddhist teachers.

Mary Stredwick met Suzuki Roshi and thought he was marvelous and went
to the zendo here, the Zen studies at the same time as I did. He gave us
knowledge that there was another way to be. That one could become
enlightened. It meant hard work. And you needed a teacher. Some went to
Findhorn. William Erwin Thompson came. Some went onto his board. It
expanded their horizons and made good friends.

We were socially pretty much the same. Some were famous. The rest were
nice bright people, some with recently famous fathers, with decently
educated ancestors, we were not hippies. None of us did any drug stuff. We
did know Huxley. Ram Dass came here. Nancy knew him well. We talked about
taking drugs. Everybody got a drive toward enlightenment.

There were six of us on the board at Zen Studies who left including
Peter Matthiessen. Haven’t seen Edo since. I just wrote him a letter and
we were through. He had no remorse. He thought Americans were stupid and
had no bones about saying it. We were crude and uncivilized. He thought
nothing of women. The head of the Syracuse Zendo, left with her husband .
She went back and he was responsible for their break-up. She went back and
studied with him and got transmission and runs a group and feels fine
about it We six who had left the Daibosatsu zendo and Zen studies kept in
touch..

So three months after I left Edo I was in Bloomingdales buying
suitcases and this Tibetan monk was also buying suitcases. I took one look
at him and had a shock. I went right up to him and said, "Do you take
women students." He said, "No." "Where do you
live?" "India." "Can I come there?" "Well,
not really." There was someone with him who I knew. Les Hixon, who
said, "You’d better leave him alone." He sat down and said,
"Oh, I know you. Aren’t you with that zendo in New York?" And
I said, "No more." He said, "I want to give them some
money." He wrote a three thousand dollar check to me. My son had
gotten married in Peru. So I got the suitcases. Then I went and bought a
bathrobe and I met Rinpoche again. Then I went and got some soap and I met
him again. We smiled and nodded each time. I wondered what would happen..

Two months later someone from the zendo called me up and said, "I
have this Tibetan monk here. This nice Tibetan monk’s coming over, so
why don’t you come over and meet him." So I did. And it was the
same Rimpoche. We smiled and nodded and he said he was going to India. I
said, "Me, too. Can I visit you?" He said, "I’ll be in
Kampong above Darjeeling." I wasn’t planning to go to India, I was
just being sneaky. So I went. Les Hixon and his wife helped him buy 600
acres in the Catskills near Livingston Manor next to Daibosatsu adjoining
it. Earlier, in 1976, Edo got Kapleau there and others from Japan. There
was this big dedication of the Daibosatsu. So Sheila Hixon and I went to
India and spent 10 days with this Rinpoche. He gave no directions, but he
seemed like Suzuki Roshi – trying to figure out what to do. A woman
named Gail Wearson who helped him came to America and said, "You have
to ask him to take refuge." I went to him and asked him, "What
does that mean?" And he said, "You can leave me but I can’t
leave you." His name is Domo Geshe Rinpoche. He was Lama Govinda’s
teacher in a prior incarnation in The Way of the White Clouds. He was 35.
That was 1976. He’s 60 now. He’s still in both places. He has five
male monasteries in India.

I was happily married. My husband and I between us had seven children.
I had four, he had three. My first husband and my husband’s first wife
were schizophrenics but we had a great bond.